United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[Alcibiades]

Definitely. It still sounds like he has a lot of popularity in his electorate and he'll no doubt be able to get lots of volunteers. The big question is who Labour pick as the replacement and whether the transient nature of the seat works against him.

If I had to call I think he'd probably be the favourite but I could easily see him winning in a blowout or losing quite comfortably.

The main thing making me think that Corbyn starts as the underdog is the very poor track record of even popular local MPs running for re-election as independents (or effectively as such if they had a party label which was just a vehicle for their campaign) after falling out with/being deselected/expelled by the party they were originally elected for (as was alluded to by the mention of Frank Field). In fact, the only such MPs I can think of in the post-war era who were actually re-elected were Eddie Milne in Blyth Valley and Dick Taverne in Lincoln (and he'd won a by-election the year before), both in February 1974 (if I'm missing any, please do let me know!).

[Alcibiades]

The Conservatives say the scheme would involve 30,000 selective military placements where "the brightest and best" would get involved in cyber security, logistics, or civil response operations full-time for a year.

Everyone else would do 25 days, or one weekend a month for a year, with non-military organisations including the fire service, the police, the NHS or charities.

From a BBC article on this.

So it seems no one would actually be forced to do assault courses and get yelled at by a corporal, but I think that’s exactly the picture most people will have in mind when they skim the headlines about ‘national service’. Presumably the Tories would not be too unhappy to cultivate that impression in the minds of the voters this policy is clearly supposed to be aimed at, but I suspect that, for the most part, it will just work against them even more for all the reasons already discussed here as to why this is a laughable electoral ploy.

[Alcibiades]

The tories latest masterplan is too attack Keir as 'sleepy'; this was long planned as those sad enough (me!) to read the rubbish CCHQ Spads brief out know that they said months ago they would make Keir's age (he's 61) an issue in the election.

It is rather odd as it appears to just be annoying people in their 60s and also he doesn't look 61, nor does he look look tired...

Also a great line to use when the median age of your party's electorate is almost certainly well over 61.

[Alcibiades]

I'd also wonder about the "age cohort question"; that is, whether it's a parking lot for the UK equivalent of the kinds of young European (particularly male) voters who've been drawn to the "identitarian right", and for thom the Tories are just some stale old thing a la France's Les Républicains...

Those Redfield and Winton crosstabs are a real outlier compared to virtually every other poll, which has shown Reform as having a sharp positive age gradient — as you’d expect from a party by all accounts drawing most of its support from right-wing Tories. Considering R&W’s extensive history of dodgy crosstabs, I’m very much disinclined to believe them against all that other evidence which suggests Reform will poll negligibly with young voters.

[Alcibiades]

Exactly — parties stand down all the time in Northern Ireland — unlike in Great Britain, there’s no strong cultural norm that the major ones contest every seat. This is certainly not a case of Alliance and SF sitting down and ‘carving up’ the map between themselves.

In fact, Alliance are still running in both of the seats which Sinn Fein hold marginally over unionists: Belfast North (Alliance polled 10% there last time) and Fermanagh and South Tyrone (where they got 5%). Some pact.

[Alcibiades]

The Tories failing to nominate a candidate in any GB constituency (other than Chorley) would be astonishing

Indeed, does anyone know when the last time this happened was?

[Alcibiades]

Edit: for Labour there were a good bunch in 1945 (such as Churchill's seat of Woodford, and the City of London which they never once contested) but I'm pretty sure they never missed any after.

Except for Tatton in 1997, of course.

[Alcibiades]

There are plenty of 60%+ muslim seats, so he knows which seat he should run in.

There are not; there is precisely one such seat (Birmingham Hodge Hill), and only three majority Muslim seats in total.

[Alcibiades]

Not the joke question please God no.

Wasn't even interesting in the end; I thought it was going to be about who they would pick for the England squad at first.

[Alcibiades]

This puts the Tories in third on ElectoralCalculus. The Reform seats seem to be based on previous strong independents/minor parties (Ashfield and Rochdale, the outlier is Torbay) rather than actual Reform strength.

Yes, the models seem incapable of dealing with Reform. The most realistic forecasts would probably be obtained by factoring in EU referendum vote (and perhaps 2015 UKIP support, though as others have already said in this thread, that link is more fraught that one might initially expect), which I don't think they do.

Generally, to find Reform's best bets you'd probably be looking at seats which massively voted for both the Tories in 2019 and for Leave (the former almost always implies the latter, though the latter by no means necessarily the former), and which perhaps had enough Labour strength in 1997/2001 that Labour could once again get enough votes to allow Reform to sneak through the middle in something of a three-way race. Such seats are of course mainly found in the east of England, particularly Essex and Lincolnshire.

Ashfield is not like this, but it is one of the most idiosyncratic contests at this election; though I don't think there's any reason to suppose that Anderson is anything like the favourite at the moment.

[Alcibiades]

Finally got a Welsh Yougov poll (has been a very reliable proxy for England in the past):

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Results_BarnCymru_GE2024_FirstCall_W.pdf

Changes:

Lab: +5
Con:-18
LD: -1
Green: +3
Ref: +8

Applied nationally it gives:

Lab: 38
Con: 27
LD: 11
Ref: 10
Green: 6

Labour and Reform are surprisingly low and the Conservatives higher than ought to be.

The political crisis for Welsh Labour hasn't gotten much coverage, but I wonder if it produces weird results in Wales.

Welsh Labour today lost a vote of no confidence in the Welsh Assembly.

For various reasons, Labour held up better in Wales than in England at the last election, so it's absolutely not a surprise that there would be a smaller swing towards them there this time.

[Alcibiades]

Something obvious that I just explicitly clocked: there’s a real chance the Liberals could end up with at least as large a share of seats as of votes for the first time, seemingly, since 1906.

[Alcibiades]

In addition to what everyone else has said about just what poor form Sunak has shown here, it’s genuinely mind-boggling. Like I cannot think of any remotely rationally defensible thought process that could have come up with this as a good idea.

[Alcibiades]

According to Crick, the missing seat is Rotherham

https://x.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1799105249678143891

I guess we have a new contender for the seat with the highest Reform vote share then, though obviously they will come nowhere near to winning it.

[Alcibiades]

https://twitter.com/scottygb/status/1800231637265068343
Respect.

Say what you will about whether or not this strategy will actually work, he definitely seems like he's actually enjoying the election more than anyone else. It feels like he took the calling of a general election as an excuse to hit every vacation destination in Great Britain and good for him.

It's much better than Jo Swinson's self-serious campaign in 2019 where she acted as if she could actually become PM.

This is what I was thinking; hard not to see Davey's campaign as being in part a reaction to that disaster.

[Alcibiades]

I just noticed Reform UK didn't field a candidate in Doncaster North, Ed Miliband's seat and one of the constituencies with the highest Leave %. His majority collapsed in 2019 (Brexit party candidate got 20% of the vote back then 💀) so curious to see how he performs this year given the Tory collapse. I don't think anyone expects him to be in danger, but still.

There is an SDP candidate running, so it seems like this could be one of the seats subject to the Reform-SDP pact. Even so, pretty odd for the reasons you mention that Reform were happy to relinquish the seat to the SDP.

[Alcibiades]

What makes "posh" SW London more Lib Dem than "posh" west-central London?  I'm guessing it's a difference between affluent professionals vs plutocrats?

Yes, pretty much. The latter is on a completely different level of ‘posh’ from the former.

[Alcibiades]

There have been shifts over time. Parts of Richmond itself (Twickenham etc remains much more 'ordinary') are now as wealthy in the plutocratic sense as anywhere in the country, whereas forty years ago it was all fairly ordinary professional middle class territory.

Even if they are rich, it’s a different type of rich (and not generally inherited wealth). The difference is maybe kind of hard to pin down but it is clearly there.

Indeed — an instructive difference seems that Barnes, the wealthiest ward in the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames, currently has an all-Lib Dem set of councillors, whereas those in the heart of South Kensington and Chelsea still have enormous Tory majorities. Although I would still say that there’s a difference in actual wealth as opposed to just culture there — in Richmond, there are probably only a few streets at best that are on the same level of genuinely plutocratic wealth that characterises large parts of Kensington and Chelsea (but yes, even those streets are probably a lot more Liberal/less Tory).

[Alcibiades]

There's been an absolute glut of pollsters this year all measuring national voting intention and almost nothing else (at least publicly) It's quite archaic. Not much on constituency polling or more local polling (which didn't do too poorly in May) and MRPs seem like curios.

To be fair, constituency polling has a very poor record. The last time it was done on a widespread scale was 2015, when it failed even more miserably than the national polls (although admittedly that maybe had something to do with Lord Ashcroft doing most of them).

[Alcibiades]

surely if you want more density, you'd rather people rezone single family housing vs creating mcmansions in suburban sprawl in a natural area.

Britain don't use zoning fwiw

Yes, and it’s very common to have houses that were built as single family dwellings which now contain multiple flats (a lot of this happened in the post-war era). Even now, the rule of thumb is that developers who want to convert a single-family home into flats will probably not face too much difficulty in getting planning permission to do so, whereas the opposite (amalgamating flats into one home) is usually impossible.

[Alcibiades]

Just seen something about how well Davey is presenting the Lib Dems as a 'left-wing alternative' to Labour. For goodness sake, Davey is probably the most right-wing leader they have had under the party's current name (i.e. from 1988 onwards).

At the very least, he’s clearly to Clegg’s left.

[Alcibiades]

I had started to think Corbyn was going to lose for some time actually. It seems as if the poll has detected a relatively sizeable number of people who were unaware of Corbyn's suspension, also as expected.

Yeah a problem for JC is he doesn’t have an alternative parties vote to rely on; a lot of people will either vote Labour because they always vote Labour, or because they didn’t realise he had been suspended.

One potentially interesting factor is what happens to the seat’s sizeable 2019 Lib Dem vote — 15.6%, which represented an increase for the party of over 70% on 2017. This followed a pattern seen in many other heavily Remain-voting, safe Labour seats in Inner London, though the proportional increase was particularly large in Islington North. This of course suggests it was largely driven by 2017 Labour voters switching over Brexit, and in particular Corbyn’s perceived Euroscepticism. All this is to say that a good deal of the 2019 Lib Dem vote in the seat was to some extent an anti-Corbyn vote, and so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see much of it flow to Nargund as the tactical anti-Corbyn option this time — which could well prove decisive.